Clever with Amy Devers

Fashion designer Scott Sternberg just wants to feel it. He grew up in Ohio, watching MTV and living an idyllic-ish childhood with requisite darkness. After an economics degree and a stint as a Hollyw…

Cognitive neuroscientist Sahar Yousef grew up in the Bay Area, the daughter of Iranian immigrants. She became fascinated by human consciousness at a young age and she followed that curiosity to studi…

Illustrator Abbey Lossing grew up in the midwest with drawing as a favorite pastime and influence from a grandmother who was a portrait painter. By high school, she was starting to take drawing serio…

Strategy and design consultant, Alain Sylvain, was born and raised in New York City, the son of Haitian immigrants. His early creativity included playing in fake bands and starting a fake restaurant.…

Gregg Buchbinder, Chairman of iconic furniture brand Emeco, grew up in southern California, on a “long leash” and with a constant longing to be surfing or sailing. That love of the ocean infused him …

Designer / public servant, Ana Monroe, grew up in the south to radio station-owning liberals who taught her to reject the status quo in favor of positive change. While she never did inherit her Panam…

Internationally acclaimed designer Humberto Campana grew up in small-town Brazil and found imaginative freedom in crafts and the local movie theater. During his adolescence it was considered subversi…

Digital designer and writer Amélie Lamont is a native New Yorker and daughter of Jamaican immigrants. A self-proclaimed nerd, she grew up reading Encyclopedia Britannica and teaching herself to code.…

Fine artist and designer, Daniel Arsham, grew up in Miami in the mirror image of the house across the street. After graduating from the Cooper Union, back in Miami he co-founded the artist-run galler…

Google’s Head of Hardware Design, Ivy Ross, learned from her industrial designer father how to see the world for how it’s made, and for the possibilities of how it could be remade. Early professional…

Industrial designer Carl Gustav Magnusson, was born in Sweden and grew up on a farm in Canada. Early life was informed by wide open spaces and a natural curiosity about cars and industrial farm equip…

Costume concept artist Gina DeDomenico Flanagan spent the first half of her childhood roller skating around a cul-de-sac and the second half riding a horse around Hawaii. She studied fashion and illu…

Designer, researcher and author Ingrid Fetell Lee spent her childhood traveling back and forth between divorced parents, indulging her curiosity during unstructured time, and losing herself in books …

In this special Clever Extra, taped live at a Be Original Americas event in Los Angeles, we conducted 6 lightning round interviews with leaders in different areas of design and architecture. Our cent…

Streetwear designer Bobby Hundreds grew up as a minority of a minority, being both Korean-American and into the socal skate punk scene. He loved to draw, but as the son of immigrants, he was not enco…

Experience designer Kristy Tillman was a very studious child, extremely driven academically. Always on the advanced track, she assumed she would one day be a lawyer like Clair Huxtable. Coding and ar…

Experience designer David Schwarz grew up “seeking weird things to explore, make and build.” Fast forward to adulthood and he’s still at it. As co-founder of Hush Studios he spends his brain power an…

Artist and designer Zoë Pawlak knew in childhood that life in suburbia wasn’t the whole picture, so she saved her babysitting money to spend some time in Chile with relatives. The experience opened t…

Lighting designer Pablo Pardo was born in Venezuela 3 minutes after his identical twin brother, making him the youngest of 5. His father’s work as a civil engineer took them to Chile until age 7, and…

Design*Sponge founder Grace Bonney grew up knowing she wasn’t straight but not knowing what to do with that. Her love of Riot Grrrl music and angry collages informed her creative identity and after s…